A modified AES based approach for data integrity and data origin authentication

Abstract

The importance of information security has significantly increased, making it a cornerstone for safely storing and transmitting digital assets and sensitive information. Various cryptography techniques have been proposed and implemented with the ultimate purpose of data protection. Nonetheless, hackers have always been a hazard to the cryptography system due to the advancement of technology, by keeping an eye on confidential databases and threatening their leakage. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), a symmetric key encryption system, was also exploited by these vulnerabilities, risking Data Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. As technology has become prone to exploits like this, it has also become essential to authenticate the sender, message, and its origin. The paper proposes a significant improvement to the Advanced Encryption Standard. It has demonstrated methods to overcome limitations by adding automatic key generation and traversal techniques to ensure sender/message authentication and non-repudiation. The implementation process has also been eased by reducing the number of rounds, lowering time complexity while optimizing performance, and making it an excellent medium for confidential data transfer for resource-constrained devices. This optimization increased data transmission rates by up to 20% over traditional AES. Graphical/statistical data comparison was made of processing time and throughput concerning the data block size to showcase the efficiency and share average findings. The main goal of this experiment was to improve conventional AES through real-world application and surpass the traditional AES constraints, which were manifested by the end of this proposition, creating scope for further R&D.